Living Consciousness

Explores the thought of Henri Bergson, highlighting his compelling theories on the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. Living Consciousness examines the brilliant, but now largely ignored, insights of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Offering a detailed and accessible analysis of Bergson’s thought, G. William Barnard highlights how Bergson’s understanding of the nature of consciousness and, in particular, its relationship to the physical world remain strikingly relevant to numerous contemporary fields. These range from quantum physics and process thought to philosophy of mind, depth psychology, transpersonal theory, and religious studies. Bergson’s notion of consciousness as a ceaselessly dynamic, inherently temporal substance of reality itself provides a vision that can function as a persuasive alternative to mechanistic and reductionistic understandings of consciousness and reality. Barnard closes the work with several “ruminations” or neo-Bergsonian responses to a series of vitally important questions such as: What does it mean to live consciously, authentically, and attuned to our inner depths? Is there a philosophically sophisticated way to claim that the survival of consciousness after physical death is not only possible but likely?

Title Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

During the many years that it took to nudge this book into its present
form, I was assisted, in ways that I cannot begin to adequately acknowledge,
by numerous colleagues, friends, family members, loved ones, and fellow
travelers on the journey to better understand the nature of consciousness. I am
pleased to be given the opportunity to express my gratitude in this context, even...

Abbreviations

A Brief Bio-Historical Preamble

Although scholars today are almost completely indifferent to the work of
Henri Bergson, at one point he was the philosopher par excellence in
Europe and America. Bergson achieved the peak of his popularity in the decade
after the publication of Creative Evolution in 1907. He continued to be very
influential in the twenties and thirties, but his impact was negligible after World...

Introduction

For well over a decade, I have been deeply engaged with the work of the
French philosopher Henri Bergson. Many of my colleagues have been
rather puzzled by my decision to commit so much time to Bergson’s thought.
While there has been a mini-resurgence of interest in his work in the last decade
(primarily among scholars who are familiar with the poststructuralist French...

Section One: Explorations of Consciousness, Authenticity, Time, and Freedom

1. The Nature of Consciousness

What can we really say about our consciousness? At first glance, it would
seem that we could say a lot. Consciousness is, after all, almost by definition,
that which we feel most immediately; it is, to paraphrase one recent
scholar of consciousness, “what it’s like from the inside.” However, the moment
when we turn our gaze inward, we are bound to notice that there is something...

2. Authenticity

Bergson argues that our tendency to fragment our inner experience, to isolate
and stabilize that which before was fluid, alive, and interwoven,
applies not only to our feelings and sensations, but also to our ideas and beliefs.
At first glance, it would seem that our conceptual life, because of its inevitable
linguistic and social underpinning, would be exempt from a Bergsonian...

3. Time

In the preceding discussion of durée, a crucial quality of our consciousness has
perhaps not been sufficiently emphasized: durée is (and subsequently, we are)
inherently, inescapably, temporal. Durée is time itself, not, as A. R. Lacey points
out, the illusory “second-best form of time” that is created when we superimpose
our perception of space over the lived experience of consciousness. Durée is not...

4. Quantity and Quality

In the first section of Time and Free Will, Bergson spends considerable time
and effort attempting to convince his readers that we are wrong to think that
the intensity of a feeling or a sensation can be quantitatively assessed or measured.
For instance, we might tell ourselves that we are happier today than yesterday,
or that we hurt less when we are pricked by a thorn than when we are...

5. Determinism

The scientific goal of understanding our consciousness as nothing more than
a series of complex neurochemical interactions (a goal that remains prominent,
even taken for granted, today) was (and is) rooted in a prior metaphysical
assumption: physical determinism. Physical determinism is the view that everything
that happens in the universe is predictable if we only have enough...

6. Alternative Understandings of the Self

During Bergson’s time, a particular type of psychological determinism frequently
dominated the psychological/philosophical discussions of the
nature of consciousness. (At the juncture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
the boundaries between psychology and philosophy were extremely
porous.) This loose-knit philosophical/psychological consensus, dating back to at...

7. Freedom

Determinism is undercut once it is recognized that durée is, in its very
nature, a dynamic, ever-new, ceaselessly changing, flowing, temporal reality
whose very essence is freedom and unforeseeable creativity. Time/durée/consciousness
is not, as many people imagine, something similar to the images that
are captured on film, in which everything is present, everything is given, and...

Liminal Section. The Dynamism of Matter

8. The World “Out There”

Section 1 focuses on Time and Free Will, Bergson’s first book, a text which
offers a relatively straightforward, more-or-less accessible account of the
contrast between durée and space, inner versus outer, freedom versus determinism,
and so on. In section 2, however, we will quite quickly leave behind the
basically dualistic mindset of Time and Free Will and enter, almost abruptly, into...

9. Movement

From a Bergsonian perspective, “reality is mobility itself ” (CM 177). Bergson
is careful with his phrasing here. He does not say that reality is that which
moves or that reality is in constant motion—a phrasing that would imply that
reality is a “thing” that has motion added to it. Instead, for Bergson, reality is,
in-and-of-itself, motion. He continually attempts to disabuse us of the idea that...

10. An Atomistic Understanding of Reality

Bergson’s claims that motion (or, more generally, change) is all that is real
and that this motion is not divisible into parts flies in the face of millennia
of philosophical, mathematical, and scientific theorizing in the West. Both the
Pythagoreans and the Platonists, in different ways, argued that change was illusory.
Similarly, the Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus, like the...

11. Going Beyond Classical Physics

In the late nineteenth century it was widely assumed that classical physics had
a basically complete knowledge of the external universe. It was taken for
granted that the universe was, in essence, a giant, utterly implacable, machine
that runs on its own, fueled only by rigorous mathematical laws and (since the
time of Darwin) sheer blind chance. This is the vision of the universe that was...

12. Melodies of the Self and the World

If it no longer makes sense to conceive of the universe as consisting of various
tiny Lego-like building blocks arranged in different rigidly determined configurations,
is there, nonetheless, some sort of workable metaphor that can help
us to begin to make sense of the subatomic underpinnings of our sense experience?
We have already seen how various contemporary physicists have drawn...

Section Two. The Matter of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Matter

13. Contemporary Understandings of Consciousness

Although it was published in 1896, Matter and Memory remains a revolutionary
work. In it, Bergson articulates a creative and persuasive solution
to what has to be one of the most stubborn and tenacious problems in Western
philosophy: the mind-body problem. Sadly, however, at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, most Western philosophers and psychologists act as...

14. Images of the Universe

In Matter and Memory, Bergson builds on the insights that he established in
Time and Free Will, while also (in ways that he rarely acknowledges) making
some subtle (and not so subtle) changes in his understandings of the nature of
human consciousness and physical reality. As we saw earlier, in Time and Free Will Bergson offered a forceful defense of the freedom and creativity of human...

15. Nonlocality and Bergson’s Universe of Images

Some might argue that Bergson’s hypothesis that the physical universe is not
a collection of discrete, localized, individual parts mechanically interacting
with each other, but instead is an interconnected, dynamic, unimaginably complex,
protoconscious “symphony” in which every “note” of the universe is
effected by, and effects, every other “note” is itself closer to a mystical vision than...

16. Perceptions and the Brain

It is important to recognize that, up until this point, in the discussion of the
genesis of perception, the focus has not been on our everyday, concrete perceptions.
(These concrete perceptions, according to Bergson, are a fusion of
what he calls “pure perceptions” and memory.) Instead, we have been examining
the “raw data” of perception—that is, “pure perception”: perception as it would...

17. The Interaction of Perception and Memory

In Matter and Memory, Bergson insists that “pure perception,” as an analytical
construct, should be understood as perception in-and-of-itself, that is, as perception
minus any and all memory. As was pointed out earlier, a pure perception
occurs when, out of a universe of potentially conscious images, only a fraction—
those that interest us—are selected. What never becomes clear, however, in...

18. Moving from Perception to Memory

At first glance, it might appear that Bergson would claim that memories and
perceptions are simply two different forms of the same “stuff” (since they
blend together so seamlessly in each moment of concrete perception). In reality,
however, until the very end of Matter and Memory, Bergson fights hard to separate
(at least analytically) perception and memory...

19. The Interweaving of Recollection Memory and Habit Memory

As was pointed out previously, Bergson emphasizes that recollection
memory and habit memory are always combined to one degree or another
in our daily lives. Each time we have an instant of recognition, each time in
which we attempt to recall an event from the past, each time in which we seek to
learn a new skill, each time in which we try to understand a passage that we have...

20. Ruminations on the Hidden Power of Memory

By now it should be clear that, according to Bergson’s theory, our pure perceptions
are created moment to moment by a process in which we unconsciously
and yet almost instantaneously give our attention to only a tiny
percentage of the pulsating, protoconscious material “images” of the universe,
allowing the rest, in essence, to pass through completely unnoticed. Almost...

21. The Presence of the Present

Of these three, the present is probably the most difficult to fully comprehend.
To a large degree, this difficulty is directly related to the fact that time is
constantly moving. And from within this ever-changing flux, it can be exceedingly
difficult to pin down exactly “where” (or more accurately, “when”) the
present exists. Even our very attempts to pin down or to grasp the present seem...

22. Memory and the Brain

Bergson’s notion that memories do not need to be stored in the brain in
order to survive unharmed appears at first glance to fly in the face of both
common sense and decades (perhaps centuries) of scientific evidence. Nonetheless,
while Bergson’s argument may seem quixotic, it is important to realize that
he does not make such a claim lightly. To begin with, Bergson underscores

23. Mind and Matter as Different Rhythms of Durée

In Matter and Memory, Bergson repeatedly stresses the profound differences
between matter and mind, a dualism that he had previously delineated and
affirmed in Time and Free Will. Bergson takes on this task, at least in part, to
convince us that the mind has an independence and efficacy of its own and can
never be reduced to blind material forces. Time and time again in...

24. Embodying Memory

According to Bergson, if and when we realize that the brain’s primary task is
not to record memories; if and when we recognize “the continuity of the
inner life and consequently of its indivisibility”; if and when we acknowledge
that all of our past is subconsciously present within us, at that point what needs
to be explained is not “the preservation of the past, but rather its apparent...

25. Becoming Conscious of the Subconscious

As we saw in the last chapter in Yuasa’s discussion of “dark consciousness,”
everyone has had numerous experiences of doing something almost utterly
automatically, giving it little or no attention, even if at least in retrospect it is
clear that a striking amount of awareness and intentionality was taking place. We
all have memories, for example, of “waking up” after driving for miles “on...

26. Recollection Memory, Dreams, and the Élan Vital

Reading Bergson’s work, it is often easy to assume that he wholeheartedly
supports the value of opening up to the hidden depths of the psyche—and
this assumption is not entirely incorrect. However, Bergson at times also appears
subtly to downplay the value of certain transrational dimensions of the human
mind. Bergson’s less-than-ringing endorsement of the subconscious strata of the...

27. Bergson and Non-Ordinary Experiences

According to Bergson, our day-to-day experience of the world is continually
shaped, under the surface of our conscious awareness, by our ongoing
choice to focus on and respond to only a very limited “amount” of the universal
flux that surrounds and interpenetrates us. We therefore perceive and interpret
only those aspects of the universe that are necessary in order to act in any given...

28. Bergson and the Afterlife

It is clear that Bergson’s theories about psi phenomena were integrally linked
in his mind with a wide range of related “spiritual” issues. One of the most
important of these issues is the possible survival of our consciousness after the
death of the physical body. Bergson did not give a lot of concerted theoretical
attention to this issue, even though he was for a time the president of an...

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